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16

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 06, 2013, 02:04:07 AM »

@Zaphide - I see what you're doing, you're starting with the generic fleet and then removing ships until it matches the same number of ships as the player, and then adding freighters. That would explain why I keep getting rebel fleets comprised of one cap ship or cruiser and one freighter up against my single frigate.

Trying to think of a better way to do it - if you're trying to give the player a challenge, maybe try to match deployment points instead? Sort the generic fleet by deployment points, remove the highest ships first until you're within say 200% of the player fleet, and then remove at random until you're within +/- 50% of the player DP? Not sure how that would work in practice, I might try it out if I have some time.

17

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 06, 2013, 01:38:15 AM »

@Plasmatic, looks like it's crashing on kadurtheocracy. Try disabling that?

@Zaphide - I think that maybe I'm running into a balance issue with Hiigaran Descendants, since that's what I've been playing with lately. It's a little short on frigates - once you take out the thing that's classed as a frigate but is really just an OP fighter, you're left with what's really just one hull kitmashed into two missile/kinetic variants.

For the time being I have removed hii_fiirkan_Standard from the starting ship choice, and added hii_vraan_Standard. It's a destroyer, and probably a bit much to start out with... but I was finding it almost impossible to take on any of the rebels with the existing selections.

18

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 06, 2013, 12:56:33 AM »

Ah so some people do play the most recent builds? Good to know I guess the only thing to be aware of is it may not be save compatible between builds, and obviously bugs

Rebel fleets are now smaller and will spawn from the outset of the game, mainly to provide light combat options for starting out. They will scale (until a point, and with some leeway) with your fleet size.

I'm a big fan of live testing, it's one of my favorite things about open-source software. If Alex provided unstable nightlies of the game, I'd play those too

I think they might be scaling a little to aggressively - the rebels showed up literally seconds after the first mining fleet, before the station had any time to even pop out a defense fleet. They managed to chase off the mining fleets to the point where nothing was showing up in the station for me to buy. I spent a while kiting them across the map long enough to let the mining fleets unload, and eventually a defense fleet showed up but it was majorly outgunned by the rebels and after one fight that left only a civilian ship, spent all its time running away.

Also curious - are all rebels the same faction? It looked like some pirate rebels were also spawning, wondering if they're going to be friendly to me (enemy of my enemy sort of thing) or just hostile to everyone.

I appreciate the attempt at some low-level baddies to fight, but honestly I'm not sure that rebels work lore-wise for me. We just got here and are working hard to get established - isn't it a bit early for dissenters to be running off with fleets to attack their former brethren? Maybe instead, pick a faction (at random, or permanently borrow a faction from another mod, or allow a faction to be selected at spawn) to be the boogeymen, and spawn in fleets from hyperspace to harass the other factions? Or maybe they could start out well established in one of the systems, and be *** off about all the other factions showing up to colonize next door... Might be easy to provide matched-level challenges - every so often, pick a victim faction and starsystem, see what kind of resources they have there, and send in something that'll give them a workout.

I do know Java, I suppose I could put my money where my mouth is if you're interested...

On another topic - do some factions start out with more resources than others? Seems like occasionally I will see the Pirates or Hegemony running around with a giant fleet full of cap ships while everyone else is still just working on their second station.

19

Suggestions / Re: UI Tweaks

« on: October 05, 2013, 11:56:52 PM »

It looks kind of like it says Tripad to me. Not sure if it's supposed to be named that or what though. I do love Pancakes! Maybe we could all vote to get Alex to make it say Pancakes there instead on the next release...

20

Suggestions / Additional Response options beyond just option picker

« on: October 05, 2013, 11:50:03 PM »

Cross-posting from the Exerelin thread. Might also be nice if something like this was available for dialogs in the campaign... but then we're probably talking about redoing both the character creation system and the campaign Panel APIs, and adding additional more generic/portable panel types. Long shot I know.

Oh, and the new expanded list of system count options now overflows off the bottom of the menu. It's too bad Alex can't add some additional controls to the menu system - a simple counter control with an upper and lower bound, or maybe just a generic text box with an input validation callback would go a long way towards simplifying some of these dialogs.

21

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 05, 2013, 11:34:00 PM »

Just started up a new game on the latest snapshot download, and found my system occupied by no less than two rebel fleets within a few days of my first station popping out their initial mining fleets, despite sharing my system with the TriTachs. Not sure what's going on?

Spoiler

[close]

Also, I appreciate the new diplomacy options in the station menu - but maybe they belong after the repair option, just above Leave?

Oh, and the new expanded list of system count options now overflows off the bottom of the menu. It's too bad Alex can't add some additional controls to the menu system - a simple counter control with an upper and lower bound, or maybe just a generic text box with an input validation callback would go a long way towards simplifying some of these dialogs.

22

Mods / Re: Hawken Fleet (0.6.1a) 0.2.2

« on: October 05, 2013, 09:31:31 PM »

Would you consider making your mod Exerelin compatible? I'd love to see it plugged in to the stuff they're got going on.

23

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 04, 2013, 05:13:48 PM »

One more bit of feedback after playing this a bit more.

The early game seems a little boring at this point. If you can snag some mining equipment and a hauler or two, you can easily spend a few minutes hauling in a ton of cash (seriously, just a stupid amount of money due to how much Supplies are worth) to go blow on a giant fleet, but your character won't have leveled up enough to do much good with it - you'll be too slow (due to lack of skills/mods to increase fleet speed) to catch anyone.

If you don't feel like mining, there's not really much else to do because of what the rest of the AI fleets are up to. You can take your starting ship out, poke around the other star systems until you find your neighbors and then go bother their mining fleets, but that's about it - you're too weak to take on anything else, and there are no small fleets to tangle with. The small fleets are mostly civilian, and want to flee, and anything larger will just wipe the map with you.

If you mine a bunch to get cash, and grind for a while to build up your experience, there's some fun to be had taking on the system defense fleets... but it shouldn't be necessary. One of my favorite activities in Vanilla is pounding pirates with my frigate fleet, and that just doesn't seem possible in Exerelin due to the composition of the AI fleets.

24

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 04, 2013, 09:54:25 AM »

Absent any meddling with special items, how do the factions/alliances decide who to partner with or fight? I'd like to think that racial xenophobic/xenophilic tendencies, territorial tensions, mining rights, etc are factored in but somehow I doubt it's that complicated

It'd also be fun to see the factions harassing enemies' mining fleets, defending their own, disrupting supply routes, etc... assuming that cutting off a station actually has an influence on fleet production out of that station. That's not clear to me at the moment - do stations actually consume supplies or fuel to produce fleets or create ship inventory? Do the AI fleets actually consume supplies or fuel when they come back to resupply?

25

Bug Reports & Support / Re: Truncated station names

« on: October 03, 2013, 11:31:47 PM »

Yeah they're definitely cramming a lot of info into the station name. I can see what they're trying to do but a lot of that info probably belongs in some sort of custom tooltip UI once that becomes possible.

As for the map grid - no possibility of extending/tiling it out as necessary, instead of having what appears to be a fixed-size grid image centered on the system's sun?

Sorry, I know this is turning into suggestions...

26

Mods / Re: [0.6a] Exerelin - Dynamic Sector and Faction War - v0.6

« on: October 03, 2013, 10:39:33 PM »

Just finally got around to trying this mod and I have to say I love it. No problems with 0.6.1a so far, although I've only played maybe an hour on any single game. Having all the different faction activity, mining, etc really makes it feel like there's more of an active game world going on around me - it reminds me a lot of if you ever played that; in Vanilla the factions don't interact much and the world feels kind of sterile. Not that it's Alex's fault since he hasn't worked on the campaign yet, but I digress.

Some feedback:

- It'd be nice if I had some way to influence the diplomatic strategy of my faction. I was picking fights with the other faction who had a station in my system, waiting to build up my fleet so I could kick them out for good... and my faction just kept allying with them. Even just the ability to view alliances, current station takeover assignments, etc would be nice.

- The 'hover over object' dynamic is a little unintuitive, but I guess there's not a better way to trigger non-combat/non-dialog events in the campaign map... it'd be nice if there was some sort of progress overlay showing what was happening though.

- Some asteroids don't seem to be able to be mined - I sit on them and don't receive any supplies. Is this intentional? If so, it'd be nice if there was some sort of 'this asteroid is depleted' type message.

- The mining fleets seem to just hang out parked on top of the station for extended periods of time - not sure what's going on there.

- How do you determine what ships get produced in a particular station? I keep waiting around to get a few Hyperions, but they never seem to become available while I have Omens and Tempests coming out my ears.

- This is more of an issue with the engine, but sometimes the world event messages get cleared faster than I'd like, and there's no way to view the history, or a log of when they happened. The campaign map needs some sort of message history window.

27

Bug Reports & Support / Re: Truncated station names

« on: October 03, 2013, 07:04:31 PM »

Also I'm pretty sure this is obvious, but the medium and large maps from Exerelin way exceed the size of the system map grid:

28

Bug Reports & Support / Truncated station names

« on: October 03, 2013, 06:56:46 PM »

Seems like there's a limit on the number of characters on a station name; once you get into the station dialog the whole word is 'Exchange'

29

Bug Reports & Support / Re: LR doesnt update when picking up one at a time from stack with shift-click

« on: September 26, 2013, 10:43:42 AM »

I've seen the second one too. I guess I always just assumed that I'd slid the mouse over just a hair before letting go, and ended up with one less than I wanted... but a rounding error on the slider would definitely explain it.

30

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: September 24, 2013, 01:23:46 AM »

So I've been mulling some ideas for new weapons, in particular I was considering an 'IFF Disruptor' that type missile. The idea was that it would be a simple unguided missile; if you could land a hit on the hull, it would override the ship's IFF transmitter for a period of time, causing missiles friendly to that ship to target it.

In practice, I'm not sure if this is possible for a few reasons:

First of all, I'd need to disable the friendly-fire protections on a per-ship basis. I think I could do this by conditionally changing the collision class to MISSILE_FF when the projectile was sufficiently close to the hacked ship, but I'm not sure.

Second, I'd need to override the missile target selection logic to override the target owner != missile owner check. Theoretically this could be done by extending the core classes under com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.missile (HeatseakerAI, MirvAI, etc); however the target selection methods are both private and obfuscated, so I would in fact have to completely re-implement all of the various type-specific logic in my mod.

Am I missing anything? Alex, does what I'm describing make any sense?